What is a cafe racer?
A cafe racer is a stripped-back retro style with low clip-on bars, a solo seat and a lean, 1960s 'race to the cafe' look.
The style takes its name from the transport cafes on Britain’s trunk roads, and one of them in particular. The Ace, built in 1938 on the western side of the North Circular near Stonebridge Park, ran around the clock and so collected the riders nobody else would serve at three in the morning. The London Museum records what they were after: they would “try to hit speeds of 100 miles per hour. This was known as ‘doing the ton’, and was legal outside built-up areas until 1965, when new speed limits were introduced.” The men who did it were the ton-up boys in the 1950s and rockers by the 1960s. The Ace shut in 1969 and didn't fully reopen until 2001.
What gets taken off
A cafe racer strips away anything that adds weight or drag: high bars are swapped for low clip-ons that bolt to the fork tubes, the seat becomes a single hump, and the tank grows long and flat to tuck behind. The riding position leans the body forward into the wind instead of sitting it upright, which is where the speed, and the look, comes from.
Individual bikes can vary.
The archetype: a Triton
Because almost any road bike can be converted this way, no two cafe racers are ever quite the same, which is most of the appeal. The archetype was the Triton, a Triumph twin dropped into a Norton featherbed frame, and the reason for it is a good one: the Norton that handled best, the Manx, was never road legal, so riders built the next best thing themselves. The National Motorcycle Museum puts it as “the Norton featherbed frame and a Triumph twin engine”, the handling of one and the engine of the other. Worth saying plainly: nobody official owns the term. It's a name riders and builders settled between themselves, and the types of motorcycle page explains how far that goes, and where UK law does draw a line.
Our cafe racer art collection shows that world in ink and blueprint styles, or upload a photo of yours and the Paint Shop turns the actual bike into art. The scrambler is the cafe racer's dirt-loving cousin, if you want the other side of the same era.
Shopping, not reading? Motorbike gift ideas starts from the rider, not from a shelf.
Written by Craig Fearn, Throttlefolio. Last updated .
Questions answered
Can any motorcycle be turned into a cafe racer?
In principle, yes - the conversion is about bars, seat and tank, not a specific base bike, which is why cafe racers come from such a wide range of donor machines.
Why is it called a cafe racer?
From the 1960s British trunk-road cafes where riders met between runs - racing informally from one cafe to the next gave the style its name.
Keep reading
- Next What is a scrambler?
A scrambler motorcycle is an on/off-road style with a higher-set exhaust, a more upright stance and dual-purpose tyres built to handle tarmac and rough ground alike.